Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

That is overly hostile and ironically wrong.

Some catalysts do get "degraded" over time and need to be regenerated. Look up palladium sintering or zeolite coking. The catalyst itself is not "damaged" but by catalyzing a reaction, its physical shape is altered (get clogged or fused together) which reduce its effectiveness. These can be regenerated by burning off the clogging or heating them up.

And if you get into the enzymes, which are biological catalysts, they are even more likely to degrade and need to be replaced.

Don't try to be smart by insulting others when you yourself are not an expert.

View on HN

The thing is, we're looking at an article that claims cars can drive without any apparent external source of energy. We need to question where the required energy comes from. So when someone says that oh, there's a catalyst, and it needs to be re-energized or replaced after a while, then it very much looks like that supposed catalyst is actually the source of energy.

Maybe that's now what was meant, maybe they were indeed talking about the catalyst being degraded. But then it's a bit weird to talk about "re-energizing", and more importantly, that still doesn't the main question: what is the energy source?

Am I too hostile towards claims that energy can be made out of nothing? Maybe. I know I don't feel guilty when exposing fraudulent claims.

The term used was "re-energized" because "the energy potential is resident within the catalyst."

That is NOT a catalyst, as roelschroeven correctly commented.

Otherwise a rechargeable battery would be a "catalyst" because it too needs to be re-energized or replaced.

What a catalyst does is lower the activation barrier between two states, without providing net energy. Getting H2 from H2O, i.e. electrolysis, requires adding energy. We know this because fuel cells work in the other direction to produce power, and entropy always increases.

I was not referring to electrolysis, I was referring to the chemical reaction between water and certain Aluminum compounds to liberate H2 (which creates Aluminum oxide and other byproducts, and if you want to recover the Aluminum catalyst, you must add energy to remove the Oxygen from the Aluminum oxide (i.e. "re-energizing" the catalyst so that it can be used again in a reaction with water). Pretty straight forward.

What you describe is not catalysis.

If oxygen is bound to the aluminum oxide, and requires energy to remove, it is not a catalyst.

Why are you capitalizing Aluminum and Oxygen?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com